BitTorrent Battles Over Bandwidth
My Personal Reflection
There are two main issues in this article. The first issue is regarding the illegal exploitation of Torrent technology. The second issue is regarding the excessive usage of bandwidth which Torrent technology consumes from Internet Service Providers(ISPs).
First of all, I would like to express my thoughts on BitTorrent. I feel that Torrent technology was not made for the purpose of illegal exploitations. The peer-to-peer technology was meant to make sharing of files more convenient for all the people in the world. However, there is always a group of baddies who want to exploit anything they can get their hands on to their advantage.
Personally, I feel that Torrent technology should not have been released as a freeware. Because of this, Torrent technology became popular and widely used in an extremely short span of time, thus attracting the group of baddies very quickly.
The way a Torrent website works is quite simple. Every Torrent website has a Torrent Tracker, which acts similarly to the human brain. This Torrent Tracker checks and approves any torrent submitted by users around the world and manages the peer-to-peer transferring of all the files submitted to the Tracker.
Now I will explain in detail the second problem which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) face due to Torrent technology. First of all, we will go down to the very basics of the World-Wide-Web(WWW). When you are downloading a file, for example you are downloading a game client engine from a gaming website, it is definitely not a one way transfer of the file. When you are downloading the file, the file is being uploaded to you by the server where the file is located. There are two main factors affecting the download speed of your file. They are your broadband and the server you are downloading from. Your broadband may be a very good one but the server may have a very lousy upstream speed, so your download cannot go over the limit of the server even though your broadband has higher limits.
So, when the server is uploading data to you, who is downloading it, the server uses up bandwidth. Bandwidth can be defined as the amount of data that can be sent over a network connection in a given period of time. Thus, offering illegal downloads of movies which are extremely big in filesize would not be feasible at all because bandwidth is very costly. Thus, BitTorrent rose to fame very quickly. This is because Torrent technology allowed files of huge size to be transferred easily by making use of the bandwidth provided by the ISPs of the users who are downloading the files, so the Torrent technology will consume very little bandwidth but it will allow users to obtain huge files!
One very famous Torrent tracker on the web is www.thepiratebay.org. This organization is practically a company already. They managed to obtain copyright protection through a proposal to the swedish government and is now internationally recognized as the most notorious legal distributor of illegal files, which is absolutely ironic because the copyright protection is internationally recognized and no country or organization can do anything against it.
I feel that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Torrent technology used, but the ones who should be pursued by the copyright act are those who are downloading the illegal files and the ones who are uploading them. The ISPs are simply not acting on the right stand by restricting the bandwidth of their users, thus they do not have my support at all.
BitTorrent battles over bandwidth
In the last few years users have started to share that content with each other across the net, whether legal or not. This is something that has plagued the music industry for several years. And now, mainly thanks to a system called BitTorrent, the movie industry could face the same struggle. But BitTorrent could also be the solution. Hollywood is definitely interested in distributing its movies over the net. King Kong is the first major film in the UK to be released as a download at the same time as on DVD. Users on the web will visit a download site and pull the data onto their computers. Many users can be served at once but, if demand is huge, users will effectively have to queue up and wait their turn. But there is another way to get hold of content and it has caused a nightmare for the music industry of late, with users sharing content amongst themselves, their peers. Using a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program and a decent internet connection, a user can make all his files available to anyone else who is using the same program. If you wanted to get hold of a particular song, your file-sharing program would hunt for that file on other people’s hard drives. When it finds it, it downloads a copy to your own computer. The more users who download the file, the more places there are for other users to get it. This reduces the likelihood of bottlenecks, and is a very efficient way of distributing files across the net. Of course, it is illegal to share copyrighted material like that. But this has not stopped people doing it. Larger files More recent developments include being able to download different parts of the same file from different users. But video files are much larger than music files and have slower upload times. This is where BitTorrent comes in. It is an incredibly efficient way of distributing large files, like video, across the net, even when there is a high demand, and even when only one person has the complete file. The key is that a user’s computer does not need to wait until it has downloaded the entire file.
As soon as it has downloaded a chunk, it starts uploading it to any other users who do not yet have that chunk.
Similarly, your computer finds other users who have chunks that you are missing, and downloads many at once.
The group of machines sharing a file is called a swarm, for obvious reasons. And the torrent of data flowing between them is called a torrent. The more people in the swarm, the faster the file spreads.
Using BitTorrent is not particularly difficult. There are many different BitTorrent programs freely available for download.
These manage the uploading and downloading for you, maximising your internet connection, which can end up shifting gigabytes in a session.
Once finished downloading, it is considered good manners to stay online, allowing the program to continue sharing the file with other users.
Broadband ‘hogs’
BitTorrent’s efficient use of broadband connections has hugely increased the amount of traffic going across the net, because it runs all users’ net connections flat out to deliver huge files.
Recent estimates say that around a third of all internet traffic is based around BitTorrent.
Some internet service providers think this is unacceptable. Recently BT began clamping down on so-called “broadband hogs”, by starting to enforce a 40GB monthly limit.
Access the article here.
ms quah said,
September 27, 2007 at 12:21 am
Certainly lots of issues arising from advances in technology which can be baffling to the layman. Continue to read widely from credible sources and think from various perspectives.